Telepathy In Stephen King's On Writing

When it comes to reading and writing the two subjects go hand in hand. Every person is different and everyone has their own way of learning. How someone chooses to advance their skills in reading and writing all comes down to how that individual finds themselves learning best. I believe that in order to become a successful reader or writer you have to ultimately be strong in both. “How to Read like a Writer” by Mike Bunn, offers fair examples of various techniques on how to become more of an effective writer. “When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing”, (72). This statement caught my attention almost instantly.

The speaker describes, “They swathed my limbs in a sackcloth gown/ on a night that was black as tar”(Cullen 7,8), which then causes the reader to imagine the scene in their mind. Cullen describes a baby being “swathed in a sackcloth gown” and this happening when the night was “as black as tar”. This imagery causes an image of what they interpret this scene to appear in their mind, which further immerses the reader into the poem. Cullen has a vivid image of what this scene looks like to himself, and the reader creating their own image of the same scene brings a better understanding to what the author was attempting to show. While Lily is asleep in the honey house, she has a vivid dream of her mother following Lily’s trail of honey and when she comes into view she is part roach. Lily explains, “She is smiling, so pretty, but then I see she is not a normal person. She has roach legs protruding through her clothes, sticking through the cage of her ribs, down her torso, six of them, three on each side,”(Kidd 174). Kidd creates a vivid and detailed image of a woman with a beautiful smile but with the lower half of her body as a roach using imagery. Kidd describes Lily’s mother as “following Lily’s trail of honey,””smiling, so pretty,” and “She has roach legs protruding through her clothes.” The imagery generates an image of the woman as

Reading one articles over and over push you to write like the writer. He shows us his own experience said, “When I read Ray Bradbury as a kid, I wrote like Ray Bradbury everything green and wondrous and see through a lens smeared with the grease of nostalgia. When I read James M. Cain, everything I wrote came out clipped and stripped and hard-boiled.”(212)King puts passion in reading and writing, by his teenage ages everything change, and his found his own style. This prove that practice make us perfect, when you have love for one domain and you put hard work, you succeed. We have to learn also that talent it is no enough, for we can see example of his son with saxophone lessons. Time, love, passion joy, determination help us to achieve our

This chapter of the textbook by E. Shelley Reid’s Ten Ways To Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musings for College Writing addresses writing students. Reid uses expository and descriptive types of writing in her text. She describes and explains about the ten different important things when it comes to writing. One example in her chapter is where she explains how to write by the rules, describes the steps on how to be a successful writer and why some people struggle with writing essays or paragraphs sometimes. The writer quoted, “Write about what you know about so that you can show not just tell in order to adapt to your audience’s needs and accomplish your goals. Unless you do a good job showing what you mean, your audience will not understand your message.” (4) She also stated in one of her steps that sometimes the audience or readers of an essay or writing cannot exactly understand what the writer is trying to tell them. She tells her audience to

King does this right from the beginning by stating that "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: Read a lot and write a lot" (221). Though this mainly stands as advice to fledgling writers it goes with the thought

He submitted hundreds of stories to magazines, mostly in the genres of horror or science fiction, and proudly displayed the rejection slips on a large nail over his typewriter. In King's book "On Writing", he recalls, "By the time I was fourteen… the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing" (41). Rejection was simply a motivation for King to write better than before.

In his article “Reading to Write” Stephen King uses various rhetorical strategies to persuade his audience that reading is necessary to writing. Rhetorical strategies are used as tools to strengthen an argument. These literary tools could be used to establish credibility, create emotional ties, or maintain a connection with the reader. Throughout his article “Reading to Write” Stephen King uses multiple rhetorical strategies and literary tools such as his unique use of diction, personal anecdote, and rhetorical questioning to persuade his audience that reading well is imperative to writing well.

Authors use literary elements and techniques as tools to convey meaning. These devices are the means by which authors bring richness and clarity to a text. They express moods or feelings that allow the reader to connect with the writing. In On Writing, the author, Stephen King makes use of literary elements to tell his story. The techniques King uses are effective in portraying vivid images and feelings in the reader’s mind.

Stephen King, in his chapter titled “Toolbox” in On Writing, aims to convince the struggling writer that taking simple steps to organize a metaphorical box of writing tools will improve their writing. He does so through the use of organization, substance, and style and by appealing to his audience with logical examples to support his claims. “Toolbox” is, in summary, a crash course given by King on writing improvement. He depicts the fundamentals of good writing as levels of a toolbox then demonstrates how and when each writing tool should be used (King 106-107). The chapter is a veritable response to the question, “How can I improve my writing?” which one can imagine King is routinely asked as a world-renowned author. He already enjoyed an immensely successful writing career when Hodder published On Writing in 2012, so King wrote the chapter “Toolbox” as literary advice to fellow writers by drawing from his own success (“Stephen King”).

Stephen King’s insight on dreams are all based on personal experiences. King begins by comparing the functionality of a dream to a mirror “I’ve always used dreams the way you’d use a mirror to look at something you couldn’t see head on”. By using this idea of dreams being like mirrors, King is able to alleviate his writer 's block by depicting his dreams directly onto paper. An example would be when King had already written seven to eight hundred pages of his novel which he could not seem to finish. Then later reveals how a nightmare provoked the ending, he states how he woke up frightened yet at the same time relieved he’d finished the book. According to King all he had to do at this point was to take his dream and transfer it to paper. Without a doubt, King’s personal experiences can justify why he believes “dreams are a way that people’s minds illustrate the nature of their problems. Or maybe even illustrates the answer to their problem in symbolic language”.

This is an example of imagery which King uses to express his view of early television. He saw it as an incredible little box that offered visual entertainment much like a book offers entertainment. The vivid description paints a picture in your head of his TV and the things he watched. To him it was a whole new world, and he shares tat feeling with his readers using this imagery.

King puts a particular emphasis on reading as a necessity to becoming a better writer in his novel On Writing. He makes the point that reading will present a writer with "the tools to write", and that if a writer does not have the time to read "then they don't have the time to write." The "learning process going on" while reading is usually learning what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a story. I am conscience of "the craft" when the author makes artistic choices that either help tell a good story or hinder its development.

This an an example of personification and imagery. King explains the randomness of ideas when he writes, he makes it clear that he can’t just pull ideas out of drawer. He describes the ideas as “sailing out of the empty sky” and joining together to make something new under the sun. His ideas come to him whenever they please, he has no control over it. He clearly states that his job as a writer is to recognize them when they appear.

Everyone knows what writing is to one extent or another, but we all have different definitions of how it should be done and varying degrees of seriousness about the art. We all have a process of writing, but each is unique to ourselves and our own experiences. Annie Dillard and Stephen King are two well known authors who have published many pieces, two of which describe how they view the writing process and let their readers get a peek of what goes on through their minds when they write. These two pieces are Dillard’s The Writing Life and King’s “What Writing Is.”

In this passage, King is describing writing as imperfect. You are not always going to be surrounded by peace and quiet. Neither, are the circumstances in your life always going to be excellent for writing. However, this is the beauty of writing; not having a fairytale writing space and schedule. He is defining writing as something that needs to be a desire the writer, and should be done only when he or